The first Crips appeared on the streets of South Central Los Angeles in blue bandanas, leather jackets, and starched Levis between 1969 and 1971. Co-founder Stanley “Tookie” Williams described their mission as protecting South Central residents from racism, police brutality, and rival gang violence. 

In just a decade, that mission had exploded into a criminal enterprise, and the crack cocaine epidemic pushed Crip sets into at least 41 states. “By 1980, there were approximately 15,000 Crips and Bloods gang members in and around the Los Angeles area,” reads a 1993 report from the Justice Department. “The typical age of a gang member varied from 14- to 24-years-old.” And over time, the gangs became fixtures of American popular culture—symbols of everything that had gone wrong in urban America.

Gang violence remains among the most important criminal justice stories in America, and what to do about it is the subject of a transformational documentary film made by the people most affected. Shot almost entirely on iPhones by residents, Nothing to See Here: Watts is not just a gritty portrait of urban violence, although it is that too. The documentary is a working playbook for how communities can reclaim their streets by telling their own stories.

The project began in December 2021, when Michael Soenen, a venture capitalist volunteering with the Healthy Room Project, a non-profit focused on improving youth housing, joined a police ride-along in Watts with LAPD Officer John "Johnny" Coughlin. Over three hours, he witnessed three gang shootings and watched one of the victims die in the street. That single violent night made Soenen understand something obvious that had somehow escaped wider attention: the daily traumas of Watts were invisible to the rest of Los Angeles and cried out for documentation.

“Literally the next day, we bought 20 iPhones and started handing them out to whoever would take them on both sides of the law,” says Soenen. They had to ask more than 200 people—including “gang members, police officers, kids, priests, prostitutes, fellow officers”—to find the 20 people who would turn their cameras on family rituals as well as fraught street corners, jokes, grief, and the constant calculus of........

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